Verse of the day

About three o’clock Jesus cried out loudly, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” This means “My God, my God, why have you left me alone?”

According to the verse, it was the best day ever. It was the worst day ever. Jesus Christ teetered in the balance of life and death as He hung—brutally nailed to a rough wooden cross—above the heads of those who looked on. Some were chiding, some were weeping, some were completely indifferent to His suffering. In His surrendered-to-the-Father manner, Jesus had allowed those to whom He had come to bring eternal kingdom life to murder Him in one of the cruelest ways that humanity has yet to conjure.

Jesus suffered on the cross, exalted and humiliated, for all to see. The pull of the rough spikes hammered into His feet and hands forced Him to battle for every breath. Blood oozed from deep rips into the flesh of His back and shoulders where whips laced with bone and metal had torn through His skin. Coils of thorny briars forced around His head cut like razor wire into His brow and scalp. His face was beaten, bruised, and swollen until He was barely recognizable, yet it wasn’t the pain of His ghastly wounds that caused Him to cry out.

At that moment, Jesus was suffering the wrath of God aimed at sin, yours and mine. God had loved His only begotten Son from all eternity. That love is just as real now. Yet, at that moment, the Eternal Father turns away from His Son. He leaves Him alone, because of the sin that Jesus, incarnate as a man, took on Himself in your place and in mine. Jesus buried Himself in the consequences of our sin. Nailed to the cross, Jesus finds Himself alienated from God, not as divine Son, but as the incarnate man. So, He cries out in the language of his mother Mary, “My God, my God, why have you left me alone?”

How could the Son of God and the Son of man share in the eternal love of the Three in One God and at the same time find Himself separated from that union? This remains one of the most impossible to understand moments in human history. Cyril of Alexandria invites those who stare in wonder at this moment to “adore in silence” because, as Jesus hints in John 13:31, “Now is the time for the Son of Man to receive his glory.” Jesus took on the wrath of God. He absorbed the arrow that was drawn and aimed at you and me. You and I were already dead, but Jesus gave His life so that we could live his kingdom life. This is how Jesus defines love.

By David Massey, Bible League International staff